Pedro Lilienfeld

Here, again, the pained words that I have cited before:
Primo Michele Levi (1919-1987): Italian chemist, partisan, writer and
Jewish Holocaust survivor: “C’è Auschwitz, quindi non può esserci Dio. Non trovo una soluzione al dilemma. La cerco ma non la trovo.” (“There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God. I don’t find a solution to this dilemma. I keep looking, but I don’t find it.”). That quote, had been unbeknown to me and, years before, I had coined a similar but more aggressive take than Primo Levi’s: “After the Holocaust, God – if it ever was – forfeited any right to its very existence”.

The following is a list of nonbelievers in the sciences who I have known about. There are many more that are unknown to me. It is notable how many of these, to me famous, people were Nobel Prize recipients and/or were major contributors to the advancement of science. It should be considered that the first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901 and none posthumously. Not surprisingly, many physicists and biologists of fame are part of this roster of nonbelievers.

Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783): French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. He was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie.
Hannes Alfvén (1908–1995): Swedish electrical engineer and plasma physicist. He received the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). He is best known for describing the class of MHD waves now known as Alfvén waves.
Philip W. Anderson (1923–2020): American physicist. He was one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977. Anderson has made contributions to the theories of localization, antiferromagnetism and high-temperature superconductivity.
François Arago (1786–1853): French mathematician, physicist, astronomer and
politician.
Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927): Swedish scientist and the first Swedish Nobel Prize winner.
Julius Axelrod (1912–2004): American Nobel Prize–winning biochemist, noted for his work on the release and reuptake of catecholamine neurotransmitters and major contributions to the understanding of the pineal gland and how it is regulated during the sleep-wake cycle.
Marcellin Berthelot (1827–1907): French chemist and politician noted for the Thomsen-Berthelot principle of thermochemistry. He synthesized many organic compounds from inorganic substances and disproved the theory of vitalism.
Hans Bethe (1906–2005): German-American nuclear physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. A versatile theoretical physicist, Bethe also made important contributions to quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, solid-state physics and astrophysics. During World War II, he was head of the Theoretical Division at the secret Los Alamos laboratory which developed the first atomic bombs. There he played a key role in calculating the critical mass of the weapons, and did theoretical work on the implosion method used in both the Trinity test and the “Fat Man” weapon dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.
Niels Bohr (1885–1962): Danish physicist. Best known for his foundational
contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.
Sir Hermann Bondi KCB, FRS (1919–2005): Anglo-Austrian mathematician and cosmologist, best known for co-developing the steady-state theory of the universe and important contributions to the theory of general relativity.
Louis de Broglie (1892–1987): French physicist who made groundbreaking
contributions to quantum theory and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1929.
Sean B. Carroll (1960–): American evolutionary developmental biologist, author,
educator and executive producer. He is the Allan Wilson Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Sean M. Carroll (1966–): American cosmologist and theoretical physicist specializing in dark energy and general relativity.
James Chadwick (1891–1974): English physicist. He won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910–1995): Indian-American astrophysicist known for his theoretical work on the structure and evolution of stars. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983.
Francis Crick (1916–2004): English molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist; noted for being one of the co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.
Pierre Curie (1859–1906): French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity and radioactivity, and Nobel laureate. In 1903 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife, Marie Curie, and Henri Becquerel, “in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel”.
Richard Dawkins (1941–): English evolutionary biologist, creator of the concept of the meme; outspoken atheist and popularizer of science, author of The God Delusion and founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.
Christian de Duve (1917–2013): Belgian cytologist and biochemist. He made
serendipitous discoveries of two cell organelles, the peroxisome and lysosome, for which he shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Albert Claude and George E. Palade.
Daniel Clement Dennett III (1942-2024) was an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.
Paul Dirac (1902–1984): British theoretical physicist, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, predicted the existence of antimatter, and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933.
Paul Ehrenfest (1880–1933): Austrian and Dutch theoretical physicist, who made major contributions to the field of statistical mechanics and its relations with quantum mechanics, including the theory of phase transition and the Ehrenfest theorem.
Hugh Everett III (1930–1982): American physicist who first proposed the many-
worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, which he termed his “relative state” formulation.
Richard Feynman (1918–1988): American theoretical physicist, best known for his work in renormalizing Quantum electrodynamics (QED) and his path integral formulation of quantum mechanics . He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.
James Franck (1882–1964): German physicist. Won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1925.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939): Austrian neurologist known as the father of psychoanalysis.
Jerome Isaac Friedman (1930–): American physicist who won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor, for work showing an internal structure for protons later known to be quarks.
George Gamow (1904–1968): Russian-born theoretical physicist and cosmologist. An early advocate and developer of Lemaître’s Big Bang theory.
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1772–1850): French chemist and physicist. He is known mostly for two laws related to gases.
Sheldon Glashow (1932–): American theoretical physicist. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory.
Camillo Golgi (1843–1926): Italian physician, biologist, pathologist, scientist, and Nobel laureate. Several structures and phenomena in anatomy and physiology are named for him, including the Golgi apparatus, the Golgi tendon organ and the Golgi tendon reflex. He is recognized as the greatest neuroscientist and biologist of his time.
David Gross (1941–): American theoretical physicist and string theorist who was
awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-discovery of asymptotic freedom.
J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964): British polymath well known for his works in physiology, genetics and evolutionary biology. He was also a mathematician
making innovative contributions to statistics and biometry education in India.
Haldane was also the first to construct human gene maps for hemophilia and color blindness on the X chromosome and he was one of the first people to conceive abiogenesis.
Alan Hale (1958–): American professional astronomer, who co-discovered Comet Hale–Bopp, and specializes in the study of sun-like stars and the search for extra-solar planetary systems, and has side interests in the fields of comets and near-Earth asteroids.
Stephen Hawking (1942–2018): British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author, and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge.
Peter Higgs (1929–): British theoretical physicist, recipient of the Dirac Medal and Prize, known for his prediction of the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, nicknamed the “God particle”. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013.
Lancelot Hogben (1895–1975): English experimental zoologist and medical
statistician, now best known for his popularizing books on science, mathematics
and language.
Fred Hoyle (1915–2001): English astronomer noted primarily for his contribution
to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and his often controversial stance on other cosmological and scientific matters—in particular his rejection of the “Big Bang” theory, a term originally coined by him on BBC radio.
Sir Julian Huxley FRS (1887–1975): English evolutionary biologist, a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis, Secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, and a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund.
François Jacob (1920–2013): French biologist who, together with Jacques Monod, originated the idea that control of enzyme levels in all cells occurs through feedback on transcription. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Jacques Monod and André Lwoff.
Donald Johanson (1943–): American paleoanthropologist, who’s known for
discovering – with Yves Coppens and Maurice Taieb – the fossil of a female hominin australopithecine known as “Lucy” in the Afar Triangle region of Hadar, Ethiopia.
Frédéric Joliot-Curie (1900–1958): French physicist and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 1935.
Irène Joliot-Curie (1897–1956): French scientist. She is the daughter of Marie
Curie and Pierre Curie. She along with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935.
Lawrence Krauss (1954–): American theoretical physicist, professor of physics
at Arizona State University and popularizer of science. Krauss speaks regularly
at atheist conferences such as Beyond Belief and Atheist Alliance International.
Jacques Lacan (1901–1981): French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made
prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called
“the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud”.•
Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813): Italian-French mathematician and astronomer that made significant contributions to the fields of analysis, number theory, and both classical and celestial mechanics.
Jérôme Lalande (1732–1807): French astronomer and writer.
Lev Landau (1908–1968): Russian physicist. He received the 1962 Nobel Prize
in Physics for his development of a mathematical theory of superfluidity.
Alexander Langmuir (1910–1993): American epidemiologist. He is renowned
for creating the Epidemic Intelligence Service.
Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827): French scholar and polymath
whose work was important to the development of engineering, mathematics, statistics, physics, astronomy and philosophy. Considered to be the French Newton.
Richard Leakey (1944–2022): Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist,
and politician.
Leon M. Lederman (1922–2018): American physicist who, along with Melvin
Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988 for
their joint research on neutrinos.
Ernst Mach (1838–1916): Austrian physicist and philosopher. Known for his
contributions to physics such as the Mach number and the study of shock waves.
Ernst Mayr (1904–2005): Renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist,
historian of science, and naturalist. He was one of the 20th century’s leading
evolutionary biologists.
Sir Peter Medawar (1915–1987): Nobel Prize-winning British scientist best known for his work on how the immune system rejects or accepts tissue transplants.
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016): American cognitive scientist and computer scientist
in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in MIT.
Gaspard Monge (1746–1818): French mathematician. Monge is the inventor of descriptive geometry.
Jacques Monod (1910–1976): French biologist who won the Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine in 1965 for discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis.
Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012): Italian neurologist who, together with colleague Stanley Cohen, received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF).
Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (1740–1810): French chemist and paper-manufacturer. In 1783, he made the first ascent in a balloon (inflated with warm air).
Desmond Morris (1928–): English zoologist and ethologist, famous for describing human behavior from a zoological perspective in his books The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo.
David Morrison (1940–): American astronomer and senior scientist at the Solar
System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, at NASA Ames Research Center, whose research interests include planetary science, astrobiology, and near earth objects.
Yuval Ne’eman (1925–2006): Israeli theoretical physicist, military scientist, and
politician. One of his greatest achievements in physics was his 1961 discovery of
the classification of hadrons through the SU(3)flavor symmetry, now named the Eightfold Way, which was also proposed independently by Murray Gell-Mann.
Alfred Nobel (1833–1896): Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, businessman, and philanthropist who is known for inventing dynamite and holding 355 patents. He was a benefactor of the Nobel Prize.
Mark Oliphant (1901–2000): Australian physicist and humanitarian. He played a
fundamental role in the first experimental demonstration of nuclear fusion and also the development of the atomic bomb.
Alexander Oparin (1894–1980): Soviet biochemist.
Frank Oppenheimer (1912–1985): American particle physicist, professor of physics at the University of Colorado, and the founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. A younger brother of renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, Frank Oppenheimer conducted research on aspects of nuclear physics during the time of the Manhattan Project, and made contributions to uranium enrichment.
J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967): American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley; along with Enrico Fermi, he is often called the “father of the atomic bomb” for his role in the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer’s achievements in physics include the Born–Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave-functions, work on the theory of electrons and positrons, the Oppenheimer–Phillips process in nuclear fusion, and the first prediction of quantum tunneling. With his students he made important contributions to the modern theory of neutron stars and black holes, as well as to quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and the interactions of cosmic rays.
Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932): Baltic German chemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909 for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria and reaction velocities. He, along with Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff and Svante Arrhenius, are usually credited with being the modern founders of the field of physical chemistry.
Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936): Nobel Prize–winning Russian physiologist, psychologist, and physician, widely known for first describing the phenomenon of classical conditioning.
Sir Roger Penrose (1931–): English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse
Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. He is renowned for his work in mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He is also a recreational mathematician and philosopher.
Steven Pinker (1954–): Canadian-born American psychologist, psycholinguist, and popular science author.
Henri Poincaré (1854–1912): French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.
Isidor Isaac Rabi (1898–1988): American physicist and Nobel Prize–winning scientist who discovered nuclear magnetic resonance in 1944 and was also one of the first scientists in the US to work on the cavity magnetron, which is used in microwave radar and microwave ovens.
Lisa Randall (1962–): American theoretical physicist working in particle physics and cosmology, and the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science on the physics faculty of Harvard University.
Martin Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow (1942–): British cosmologist and astrophysicist.
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970): British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic and political activist. He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, colleague G. E. Moore, and his protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is widely held to be one of the 20th century’s premier logicians. With A. N. Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, an attempt to create a logical basis for mathematics. His philosophical essay “On Denoting” has been considered a “paradigm of philosophy”. His work has had a considerable influence on logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science (see type theory and type system), and philosophy, especially the philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.
Oliver Sacks (1933–2015): United States-based British neurologist, who has written popular books about his patients, the most famous of which is Awakenings.
Carl Sagan (1934–1996): American astronomer and astrochemist, a highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics, and other natural sciences, and pioneer of exobiology and promoter of the SETI. Although Sagan has been identified as an atheist according to some definitions, he rejected the label, stating “An atheist has to know a lot more than I know.” He was an agnostic who, while maintaining that the idea of a creator of the universe was difficult to disprove, nevertheless disbelieved in God’s existence, pending sufficient evidence.
Meghnad Saha (1893–1956): Indian astrophysicist noted for his development in 1920 of the thermal ionization equation, which has remained fundamental in all work on stellar atmospheres. This equation has been widely applied to the interpretation of stellar spectra, which are characteristic of the chemical composition of the light source. The Saha equation links the composition and appearance of the spectrum with the temperature of the light source and can thus be used to determine either the temperature of the star or the relative abundance of the chemical elements investigated. Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989): Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. He gained renown as the designer of the Soviet Union’s Third Idea, a code name for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The Sakharov Prize, which is awarded annually by the European Parliament for people and organizations dedicated to human rights and freedoms, is named in his honor.
Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961): Austrian-Irish physicist and theoretical biologist. A pioneer of quantum mechanics and winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Dennis W. Sciama (1926–1999): British physicist who played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War. His most significant work was in general relativity, with and without quantum theory, and black holes. He helped revitalize the classical relativistic alternative to general relativity known as Einstein-Cartan gravity. He is considered one of the fathers of modern cosmology.
Claude Shannon (1916–2001): American electrical engineer and mathematician, has been called “the father of information theory”, and was the founder of practical digital circuit design theory.
William Shockley (1910–1989): American physicist and inventor. Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Ethan Siegel (1978–): American theoretical astrophysicist and science writer, whose area of research focuses on quantum mechanics and the Big Bang theory.
John Maynard Smith (1920–2004): British theoretical evolutionary biologist and
geneticist. Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution and theorized on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signaling theory.
George Smoot (1945–): American astrophysicist and cosmologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John C. Mather that led to the measurement “of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Igor Tamm (1895–1971): Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Frank, for their 1934
discovery of Cherenkov radiation.
Kip Thorne (1940–): American theoretical physicist and winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics, known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics and also for the popular-science book, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy.
Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907–1988): Dutch ethologist and ornithologist who shared
the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns in animals.
Alan Turing (1912–1954): English mathematician, computer scientist, and theoretical biologist who provided a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer.
Harold Urey (1893–1981): American physical chemist whose pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934. He played a significant role in the development of the atom bomb, but may be most prominent for his contribution to the study of the development of organic life from non-living matter.
J. Craig Venter (1946–): American biologist and entrepreneur, one of the first researchers to sequence the human genome, and in 2010 the first to create a cell with a synthetic genome.
James D. Watson (1928–): Molecular biologist, physiologist, zoologist, geneticist, Nobel-laureate, and co-discover of the structure of DNA.
Steven Weinberg (1933–2021): American theoretical physicist. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for the unification of electromagnetism and the weak force into the electroweak force.
Victor Weisskopf (1908–2002): Austrian-American theoretical physicist, co-founder and board member of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Eugene Wigner (1902–1995): Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, engineer and mathematician. He received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 “for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles”.
Yakov Borisovich Zel’dovich (1914–1987): Soviet physicist born in Belarus. He
played an important role in the development of Soviet nuclear and thermonuclear
weapons, and made important contributions to the fields of adsorption and catalysis, shock waves, nuclear physics, particle physics, astrophysics, physical cosmology, and general relativity.
Fritz Zwicky (1898–1974): Swiss astronomer and astrophysicist.